


Magnetism and Gravitation

by a_t_rain



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Jackson's Whole
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-03
Packaged: 2018-05-11 07:13:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5617924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_t_rain/pseuds/a_t_rain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amiri never wanted to be part of the family business.  But after the fall of House Cordonah, he finds himself drawn back in.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Magnetism and Gravitation

**Author's Note:**

> This is kind of a side-story ficlet that grew out of a brief episode in my novel-length fic, [A Bit Too Much Good Work](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4168539/chapters/9409704), but you absolutely _don't_ need to read that one first.

Jackson’s Whole is the only known planet with a magnetic field powerful enough to pull everyone’s moral compass out of order, and gravitation strong enough that nobody ever really escapes its orbit.

So runs the bitter jest, repeated endlessly in the Durona Group’s laboratories on Escobar. Amiri has learned to repeat it too, at first because it struck him as clever and accurate, and later, after it has become too well-worn to make him smile, because it’s part of the lab’s culture and he wants to fit in. Which he does. The pervasive cynicism about Jackson’s Whole is just one of the things he adores about his new colleagues.

He thought, when he first came here, _If Mama and Dada knew what these people were like, they’d have sent me somewhere else._ It wasn’t until much later, on his most recent visit home (his _last_ visit home) that a chance remark from his sister Ruby put him on to the truth: his parents had always known exactly what the Duronas were like, and had made a very deliberate choice to send their second son to live among people who despised everything they stood for.

The knowledge made him irrationally angry at the time. _Do you even need to micromanage my rebellion for me?_

It doesn’t make him angry now. He has seen the vids of Baron and Baronne Cordonah’s execution, and even if they are faked (he still has hope that they may be), he does not expect to see his mother and father again. All that matters, now, is that they picked out a place _he_ would love, and people he would love, even after he turned away from all their wishes and hopes and plans for him.

* * *

He does love the clinic, and medicine, and his research, but suddenly it all seems emptied of meaning. His lab has been working on aging, on ways to reverse the slow decline at the cellular level. It is a problem with obvious humanitarian applications, but everyone on Amiri’s research team – which still consists mostly of Jacksonian expatriates, although there are a few native Escobarans in the mix – is also conscious of the more subtle ones. They all know the real reason why their patron, Lord Mark Vorkosigan, has funneled so much of his considerable personal wealth into this particular project.

Amiri hadn’t been aware of it until now, but the considerations that drove his own work were simpler, more visceral: the new tremor he noted in Dada’s hands, the slowness in his step, the liver spots that had begun to appear. He isn’t sure his siblings – who saw the Baron every day, instead of time-lapse visits a year or two apart – ever noticed these things. Mama had. He remembers the worry growing in her eyes.

They don’t believe in clone brain transplantation. ( _Didn’t_ believe in it.) He had always thought that their attitude had little to do with any ethical concerns. As far as he could tell, his mother simply regarded human cloning as _vulgar_ , and the whole industry as irredeemably ugly; his father had, at best, a sentimental fondness for children, and at worst a natural reluctance to undergo a risky medical procedure that would put him out of commission for some time and place him at the mercy of his doctors.

He wonders, now, if he has been unfair to them. Maybe _a sentimental fondness for children_ and a distaste for the _irredeemably ugly_ count as a kind of ethic, in themselves. At any rate, these traits – and a handful of others – seem to have inoculated the Baron and Baronne against the worst depravities of Jackson’s Whole, short-sighted and self-centered though their view of the world may be.

He wonders if he really is any better than they are. ( _Were_.) His research – regardless of its broader humanitarian significance – has started to seem _irrelevant_.

* * *

“Why don’t we go away for the weekend?” suggests his girlfriend. (Bryony is brilliant and gorgeous, like all of her clone-sisters, but – despite the inevitable ribbing he gets from the Escobaran postdocs on this point – he has no difficulty telling her apart from the others.) “You need some time off, I think.”

He lets out his breath slowly. “You’re right. I do.”

“Where do you want to go?”

“Somewhere with snow,” he says without thinking.

Snow is difficult to manage on Escobar, especially at this time of year. They end up going hiking in the mountains, trudging through mud and slush, until at last they are high enough to be surrounded by _whiteness_ , and it’s here that he finally lets himself cry, for a whole vanished world of snow and skating and sledding, and icicles and mittens, and hot chocolate in the afternoons, and sisters and brothers and parents. For a Jackson’s Whole childhood. This is a side of the place he can honestly mourn. Bryony waits until he is ready to leave, and does not judge him for grieving.

* * *

When they get back, one of the undergraduate interns runs up to him, breathless. “Dr. Dax!”

He turns at once, grown used to his new name. He has started making Bryony use it, even in private. If he is to survive, it is safest to forget that he was ever Baronet Cordonah.

“We’ve been looking for you _everywhere!_ ”

“What’s the matter?”

“You got a comcall from the shuttleport. Some guy who says he’s your brother.” The intern’s voice is dubious.

“But he doesn’t look like me, is that it?” Amiri tries for detachment, but he finds himself running, matching the intern’s pace. “Is he still on? Let me talk to him!”

* * *

Jet submits to all of the identity-disguising treatments the Durona clinic can provide without a word of complaint, although Amiri knows it has to be painful, emotionally as well as physically. It means erasing so many of the features that mark him as one of the Baronne’s created children. Bryony goes out of her way to make his brother welcome, despite the fact that a permanent guest makes their little apartment impossibly cramped. They take Jet up to the mountains, and (at Amiri’s suggestion) to an ice-skating rink.

It isn’t enough. Amiri can see his little brother drooping and fading day by day, growing distant and pensive, but still determined to survive. Jet has always been the most independent of the Jewels; he is much younger than the others and has had only a few of the loyalty treatments that would have bonded him to their mother for life, but he still shares the soul-deep connection with his older sisters that makes their absence almost unbearable. How much worse must it be for the others?

Jet insists that the other Jewels are all alive, somewhere out there in the galaxy; he can sense it. Amiri doesn’t believe him. It has been months since the fall of House Cordonah, and they would have sent word. (Besides, Rish and Em spent _weeks_ trying to convince Amiri they shared a telepathic bond when they were kids; they drove him half-crazy with jealousy until he got the bright idea of testing them by rolling dice with Em, and having Rish sit in a different room and write down the numbers she thought had come up. After he made Em stop _tapping her foot on the floor_ , Rish did slightly worse than random chance.)

 _Then_ , one mad, miraculous day, Mama and Dada and Grandmama and Star and Pidge and Em and Pearl turn up at the shuttleport, all talking and hugging and crying at once, and Amiri rashly promises Jet that he’ll never doubt him again. Jet isn’t even listening, because Em and Pearl have absorbed him into a sort of group huddle, healing by touch.

* * *

Amiri’s first question, once he can talk again, is _where are the others?_ The story his family has to tell is grim: Erik murdered by the Prestenes and cryofrozen. Topaz alive, but a prisoner; Baron Prestene has been keeping her closely guarded ever since she helped their parents escape. Ruby on Fell Station, trying to Deal for Fell’s support. (Mama and Dada ought not to have allowed that, Amiri thinks; they ought to have sent Star or Pidge, and not parted Ruby from the others. But he understands the politics involved: Great Houses do not fall without inside help. It might have been their former security chief, whose whereabouts are unknown, but the other possibility, the one no one is talking about openly, is that it was one of the children. And Ruby, the almost-jeeves, is the one Mama trusts above all the others.)

Nobody knows anything about his two youngest sisters until a week later, when Lilly Durona, Senior, calls the whole family into her office and informs them that Tej has apparently married some Barrayaran lordling who is related to Lord Mark, and that Rish is with them on Barrayar. _What was Tej thinking_ , Amiri wonders, _to bring Rish to such a place and make her stay there, without even trying to get word to us?_ He might have eased the starved look on Jet’s face weeks earlier if he had _known_. The evenchildren are supposed to _look after_ the Jewels; the Baronne has always made their responsibility clear; Tej ought to have known it.

* * *

Amiri would have welcomed his family without reservation; he is less sure about welcoming House-Cordonah-in-exile, but in the end he accepts that they must take back the House, because there is no other way to rescue Topaz and Erik.

Baron Fell has often been a useful ally – and at the moment he is a _necessary_ ally – but he and Dada are not friends. Jacksonian Barons don’t have _friends_. They will sell each other out without hesitation if the price is right. It’s a miracle that Fell hasn’t sold _Ruby_ to the Prestenes, as yet, because House Prestene has the money and the power to match almost any price. Besides, House Prestene is an _entity_ , and House Cordonah, at the moment, is a theoretical construct.

He spends one last afternoon in the laboratory before they leave for Barrayar, and notes that the Duronas seem to be quietly steering him away from access to comconsoles, data-disks, and anything else of significance. They send him downstairs to feed the lab animals, instead, which is a task that the undergrads normally do.

He lingers there, watching the mice run and nest and squabble. They don’t know that they are extraordinary mice, but they are. The oldest of them is almost six.

No wonder the Duronas are keeping him away from anything _important_. They are Jacksonians, and they all understand the temptations involved; they know what Baron Fell’s price is likely to be. Everybody knows. This _has_ to be what Ruby promised him, how she has managed to dance along the edge for so long.

* * *

What the Duronas don’t know is that he has always kept a private, longhand copy of his lab notes; something about the act of writing them out every evening helps to fix his research in his memory, and he has often had unexpected insights while reviewing them. He has never intended any harm by it, nor has he ever meant the notes for anyone’s eyes but his own. But he understands what they are worth, under the circumstances.

 _It’s only information_ , he tells himself. _We’re several years off from human trials, and Fell’s people will need to do the rest of the work themselves. May the best scientists win. That’s how it ought to work, isn’t it? Information needs to be shared, especially when it can save lives._

But it is a betrayal. All of the Duronas will see it that way. Their independence from House Fell was hard-won, and they abhor the idea of turning over their intellectual property to anyone at all, but they _especially_ hate the possibility that it might end up in the hands of Baron Fell. Lord Mark, who is playing a longer and deeper game, might forgive him, but nobody else will. Least of all Bryony, who will certainly notice that his notebook is missing, even if she chooses never to tell the others.

He hesitates a moment, and then packs the notebook away in his luggage, hands shaking. _Nobody ever really escapes the orbit of Jackson’s Whole._


End file.
